to this unhappy house more!" and, uttering this, almost with a shriek, she burst past the two women, and ran through the rooms to seek her sister.

Meantime Flora had sat so long waiting, without seeing her sister, that she began to feel intense anxiety; and, fancying her little Kate wished to forget her, because she was poor, had worked herself up into a resolution of assumed coldness, when she heard a hurried step, and the door was instantly opened. Kate paused for a moment after her entrance, and stood gazing upon the companion of her youth, with a look of such passionate joy, that Flora's intended coldness was entirely subdued; and the two sisters rushed into each other's arms in all the ecstasy of sisterly love.

"Oh, Flora, Flora! my dear happy Flora!" cried Kate, when she could get words, after the first burst of weeping; "have you really come all the way to London to see me? poor me!" and her tears and sobs were again like to choke her.

"Kate, my dear little Kate!" said, Flora, "this is not the way I expected to find you. Do not greet so dreadfully; surely you are not happy, Kate!"

"But you are happy, Flora ;" said Kate, weeping; "and how is my good highland father, and mother, and my brother Daniel? Ah! I think, Flora, your clothes have the very smell of the seashore, and of the bark of the nets, and of the heather hills of Argyleshire. Alas! the happy days you remind me of, Flora."

“And so, Kate, you are not so very happy, after all," said Flora, looking incredulously in her face, "and you are so thin, and pale, and your eyes are so red and yet you have such a grand house, Kate! Tell me if you are really not happy?" "I have no house, Flora," said Kate, after a little, "nor, I may say, no husband. They are both completely ruled by his two vixen sisters, who kept house for hir the entire ascendency.***

good tempered; yet

little happiness in th

he married me, and still have y husband, too, is not naturally me, and I might enjoy some he had the feeling or the spirit to treat me as his wife, an himself and the house from the dominion of his sisters, especially the eldest. But I believe he is rather disappointed in his ambitious career, and in the hopes he entertained of matches for his sisters, and is somewhat sour and unhappy; and I have to bear it all, for he is afraid of these women; and I, the youngest in the family, and the only one who has a chance of being good tempered, am, on account of my low origin, forced to bear the spleen of all in this unhappy house."

But, Kate, surely your husband would not behave so bad, as to cast up to you that your father was a fisherman, when he took

you from the bonnie sea side himself, and when he thought himself once so happy to get you?"

"Alas! he does indeed!-too often-too often; when he is crossed abroad, and when his sisters set him on, and that is very mean of him; and it so humbles me, Flora, when I am sitting at his table, that I cannot lift my head; and I am so sad, and so heart-broken among them all!"

"Bless me! and can people be really so miserable," said Flora, simply, "who have plenty of money, and silk dresses to wear every day they rise?"

"It is little you know, my happy Flora, of artificial life here in London," said Kate, mournfully. "As for dress, I cannot even order one but as my sister-in-law chooses; and as for happiness, I have left it behind me on the beautiful banks of the Clyde. Oh, that I were there again!"

"Poor little Kate!" said Flora, wistfully looking again in her sister's face; "and is that the end of all your grand marriage, that has set a' the lasses crazy, from the Fairly Roads to Gourock Point? I think I'll gang back and marry Bryce Cameron after

a'."

"Is Allan Cameron married yet?" said Kate, sadly. "When did you see blithe and bonnie Allan Cameron? Alas! the day!" "He gave me this brooch to return to you, Kate," said Flora, taking the brooch out of her bosom. "I wish he had not given it to me for you, for you're vex'd enough already."

"Ah! well you may say I am vex'd enough," said she, weeping and contemplating the brooch. "Tell Allan Cameron, that I am sensible I did not use him well-that my vain heart was lifted up: but I have suffered for it-many a sad and sleepless night I have lain in my bed, and thought of the delightful days I spent near my father's happy cottage in Scotland, and about you, and about Allan. Alas! just tell him not to think more of me, for I am a sad and sorry married woman, out of my own sphere, and afraid to speak to my own people, panting my heart out, and dying by inches, like the pretty silver fish that floundered on the hard stones, after my father had taken them out of their own clear water.

"God help you, Kate," said Flora, rising; "you will break my heart with grief about you. Let me out of this miserable house! Let me leave you and all your grandeur, since I cannot help you; and I will pray for you, my poor Kate, every night at my bed-side, when I get back to the bonnie shore of Argyleshire."

Sad was the parting of the two weeping sisters, and many a kiss of fraternal affection embittered, yet sweetened, the hour; and

anxious was Flora M'Leod to turn her back upon the great city of London, and to journey northwards to her own home in Scotland.

It was a little before sundown, on a Saturday evening shortly after this, that a buzz of steam, let off at the Mid Quay of Greenock, indicated that a steam-boat had come in; and it proved to be from the fair sea-port of Liverpool, having on board Flora M'Leod, just down from London. The boat, as it passed, had been watched by the cottagers where she lived up the Firth; and several of them, their day's work being over, set out towards the Clough, to see if there was any chance of meeting Flora.

Many were the congratulations, and more the inquiries, when they met Flora, lumbering homewards with her bundle and her umbrella, weary, and looking anxiously out for her own sweet cottage by Clyde side. "Ah, Flora! is this you?" cried the whole "and are you really here again ?—and how is your sister, and all the other great people in London? and, indeed, it is very good of you not to look the least proud, after coming from such a grand place!"

at once;

With such congratulations was Flora welcomed again among the light-hearted fisher people in the West of Scotland. But it was observed that her tone was now quite altered, and her own humble contentment had completely returned. In short, to bring our story to a close, she was shortly after married to Bryce Cameron, and various other marriages soon followed; for she gave such an account of what she had seen with her eyes, that a complete revolution took place in the sentiments of the whole young people of the neighbourhood.

It was observed, in the hamlet, that the unhappy Mrs Pounteney was never named, after this, by any but with a melancholy shake of the head; the ambition of the girls to get gentlemen, seemed quite extinguished; and Flora, in time, began to nurse children of her own in humble and pious contentment.

She received many letters after this from London, over which she often wept to herself, while she prayed in private that poor Mrs Pounteney might yet experience happier days; but she was never heard to utter one vaunting word more concerning "my sister Kate."

PICKEN.

*The Dominie's Legacy.

ODE TO LIBERTY.

A GLORIOUS people vibrated again

The lightning of the nations: Liberty

From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o'er Spain,
Scattering contagious fire into the sky,

Gleamed. My Soul spurned the chains of its dismay,
And, in the rapid plumes of song,

Clothed itself, sublime and strong;

As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among,
Hovering in verse o'er its accustomed prey;
Till from its station in the heaven of fame
The Spirit's whirlwind rapt it, and the ray
Of the remotest sphere of living flame
Which paves the void was from behind it flung,
As foam from a ship's swiftness, when there came
A voice out of the deep: I will record the same.

The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth :
The burning stars of the abyss were hurled
Into the depths of heaven. The dædal earth,
That island in the ocean of the world,
Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air :
But this divinest universe

Was yet a chaos and a curse,

For thou wert not: but power from worst producing worse, The spirit of the beasts was kindled there,

And of the birds, and of the watery forms, And there was war among them, and despair

Within them raging without truce or terms:

The bosom of their violated nurse

Groan'd, for beasts warr'd on beasts, and worms on worms, Ana men on meu; each heart was as a hell of storms.

Man, the imperial shape, then multiplied

His generations under the pavilion

Of the Sun's throne: palace and pyramid,

Temple and prison, to many a swarming million, Were, as to the mountain-wolves their ragged caves. This human living multitude

Was savage, cunning, blind, and rude,
For thou wert not; but o'er the populous solitude,
Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves
Hung tyranny; beneath, sate deified

The sister-pest, congregator of slaves
Into the shadow of her pinions wide;

Anarchs and priests who feed on gold and blood,
Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed,
Drove the astonished herds of men from every side.

The nodding promontories, and blue isles,

And cloud-like mountains, and dividious waves

Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles
Of favouring heaven: from their enchanted caves
Prophetic echoes flung dim melody.

On the unapprehensive wild

The vine, the corn, the olive mild,

Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled;
And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea,

Like the man's thought dark in the infant's brain, Like aught that is which wraps what is to be,

Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein

Of Parian stone; and yet a speechless child,

Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain

Her lidless eyes for thee; when o'er the Ægean main.

Athens arose a city such as vision

Builds from the purple crags and silver towers
Of battlemented cloud, as in derision

Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors
Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it;
Its portals are inhabited

By thunder-zoned winds, each head
Within its cloudy wings with sunfire garlanded,
A divine work! Athens diviner yet

Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will

Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set;

For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill

Peopled with forms that mock the eternal dead

In marble immortality, that hill

Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle.

Within the surface of Time's fleeting river
Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay
Immoveably unquiet, and for ever

It trembles, but it cannot pass away!
The voices of thy bards and sages thunder
With an earth-awakening blast
Through the caverns of the past;

Religion veils her eyes; Oppression shrinks aghast :
A winged sound of joy, and love, and wonder,
Which soars where Expectation never flew,
Rending the veil of space and time asunder!

One ocean feeds the clouds, and streams, and dew;

One sun illumines heaven; one spirit vast

With life and love makes chaos ever new,

As Athens doth the world with thy delight renew.

Then Rome was, and from thy deep bosom fairest,
Like a wolf-cub from a Cadmæan Mænad,
She drew the milk of greatness, though thy dearest
From that Elysian food was yet unweaned;
And many a deed of terrible uprightness

By thy sweet love was sanctified ;
And in thy smile, and by thy side,

R